New O/O, Old truck what do I need to keep her in top shape?

Ten4 I'll give it a shot

 

A lot of them came with an e9. But not many are for sale. Those that are, are higher than a giraffe’s ###

 

Shutting down the engine immediately cuts off oil supply to the hot turbo bearings,also pockets of air in the cooling system creates hot spots,letting the truck idle for couple of minutes will allow the temperature to normalize.
Warming up a diesel engine is not just to allow oil to circulate,engine components are made from different materials that have very different expansion rates,by allowing each component to reach its maximum expansion before starting to operate the truck will help prevent premature failures,leaks and excessive wear.
Thats the theory behind it and to me it makes a lot of sense.

 

I think you have a lot of knowledge you're going to have to gain and people can give you some tips on here but you're going to have to get some information on really how to maintain your truck and what to look for and if you're going to work on it you're going to have to learn how to do the repairs.

I think e-z rider has YouTube videos that show how to do brake jobs and things like that.

But what you really need to do is to scour all these pages of this website here and go into the search feature and search for all of your answers. You can find the bridge law you can find how to maintain your engine and why you shouldn't idle and all of the other things to go along with it.

The very main thing I will tell you is that before you put that truck into service to run every day you should do the things that I outlined for the truck to be Dependable or have someone do them for you.

For myself any unknown truck I would put into service it's urgent that you're going to turn the key and use it and not be constantly working on it even for little stupid things.

So it's even making sure your windows go up and down properly and you don't have crazy rattles and your weather stripping isn't letting air in and all of it needs to be ready so you can just work.

Then when something happens, and it will, you have one thing to deal with at a time rather than one thing plus another 25 you've been putting off or that weren't done.

That's the difference between a good truck and a junk truck.

A good truck everything is kept up on and you can turn the key and go.

A bad truck, whoever had it let everything go and let everything go and let everything go, and now the truck itself can't go until you do a bazillion things to it.

And then it gets to the point it's not worth doing anything to it it's just junk.

The information is all here it's all available for you like I said you've got a lot of reading and learning to do.

Also there's Facebook groups that you can join I'm sure they can give you information about repairs and such.

 

The only thing that took most of them old R models off of the road down here was cab cancer. The engine, chassis and drivetrain were indestructible. The oilfield service and chemical companies had tons of them down here. They would get pretty bad rot in the backs of the cabs in the joint where the floor and back wall are pinched together. The cab mounts would deteriorate. The firewall to cowl joints were another problem spot. Many rotted from the inside out so you have to check in the tight spots from the inside. Pull seats and rubber floor mats up. Get up under the dash real good. I always loved those cabs And one of the first ones I remember riding in was a 1976 or so going down a long rough east Tejas rig road, bouncing shoulder to shoulder with a good friend of my dad’s in a BJ Hughes services truck.
It’s a shame Mack didn’t build them cabs out of aluminum for better corrosion resistance but then they all probably woulda ended up scrapped as beer cans like the 100’s of thousands of Pete and Kw cab overs did.

 

It's a beautiful thing in hot weather. When you don't over do it.

I heat it up on the cab in warm weather.

 

May as well just use STP. Same stuff

 

I don't recall them being called bricks, perhaps a regional dialect, and the "2 stick" was not a splitter or aux. trans. The 1 stick was a 5 speed, and the other stick was R-L-H, and I was told specifically by the boss, DO NOT SPLIT, L was just a lower 1st gear, and rarely used. It's feature was you could have a 5 speed PTO. Besides, the 300/5 speed was the "lazy mans truck", as the Maxidyne motor would pull down to 1300 and redline at 2100, so a 5 speed was adequate. I wear a back brace today thanks in part to that truck,,. That truck shook so bad, it would pop out of gear. When I informed the boss, his reply, yeah, yeah, I hear it all the time, the truck rides worse on a Monday than on a Friday,,lot of Mack stories because they were so popular.